Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular software applications in the world and is used by firms in almost every industry, from pizza parlors to private equity. Companies, educational institutions, and government agencies all use Excel to manage and analyze data, create spreadsheets and reports, print charts, and much more. It’s no wonder why a working knowledge of this spreadsheet software is an essential skill for people who spend part of their workday in front of a computer, even for those that do not necessarily have an accounting or finance-related careers. Thus Excel skills are in demand, and its no surprise people with Excel knowledge are earning more money than their counterparts. By taking one of these 9 online courses, you can learn Excel online, get a leg up on your colleagues and job-seeking competitors, and increase your earning potential

GoSkills ($25/month) is a new entrant into the online course marketplace but a reliable option for Excel newbies. It comes to us from an international team with members from Canada and New Zealand. Perhaps, GoSkills greatest asset is its instructor, Ken Puls, a certified Microsoft “Most Valued Professional” and owner and operator of the vast Excel knowledge resource that is Excel Guru.

GoSkills bundled basic and advanced Excel topics in a single course that runs for just 3 hours.

GoSkills has stripped Excel down its building blocks and distilled it into 3 hours of short video tutorials that are focused on preparing you to (excuse the pun) Excel in the workplace. It offers complete transparency, allowing you to view course contents without a credit card transaction, and you can try 4 modules for free. The tutorials come with downloadable cheatsheets, excel exercise, files, and can be consumed via a fun gameification mode.

Lynda.com is the mother of all online course libraries – in part because of the matronly Lynda who founded the site in 1995 – but mostly because of the mother load of 1700+ video courses in 140 different subject areas. Lynda has 45 different courses (125 hours of video) in Excel covering Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, and Mac for Excel 2008/2011 versions with material suitable for beginners, intermediate, and advanced users of Excel, 75% percent of which is intermediate level and above.

Lynda has multiple Excel courses for different versions, tasks, and skill levels.

The courses also include homework assignments and optional Excel spreadsheet downloads. A majority of the courses are from Dennis Taylor, a seasoned trainer who has developed over 50 Excel courses, and Curtis Frye, author of more than 40 books and online training courses. A $25/month subscription fee gives you full access to these Excel courses and the rest of the Lynda.com’s library. However, if you want to download project files to engage in the accompanying learning exercises, you will need to subscribe to the premium membership which is priced at $37.50/month. A free 7-day trial is also available.

Filtered ($15/month) is the “Ferrari” of online Excel courses. It uses adaptive testing to find out exactly what you know about Excel and comes up with a custom curriculum tailored to your exact needs! A beginner with no experience can take the full course which includes 16+ hours of text and video content and has an extensive series of exercises that are setup in downloadable Excel spreadsheets to help you enforce new concepts.

Learn from tutorials, videos, and tests that are “Filtered” to suit your specific needs.

Filtered strips everything you don’t need to know and focuses on the essentials. It also covers PC versions of Excel starting from Excel 2007. Filtered was developed by former consultants and financial analysts and can take someone with zero knowledge of Excel up to the level required for an Investment Banker. For more information about Filtered check out this in-depth review.

Udemy is an online learning platform that allows just about any teacher to host and sell a course in any subject. While Udemy has over 40+ Excel course options, the Infinite Skills Excel 2010 Beginner and Advanced courses are the most popular options by a landslide. In fact these two courses were some of the early courses that helped Udemy gain a foothold in the online learning market when it launched in 2010. Since then over 60 thousand students have enrolled in the two courses. The beginner course contains 127 lectures running 9.5 hours and according to Infinite Skills, can prepare students to use Excel in a commercial environment. The advanced course has 136 lectures running 8.5 hours and covers more advanced formulas, charting, and pivot tables. Infinite Skills also hosts a third Visual Basic For Excel course, which has over a thousand enrolled students.

Infinite Skills offers several courses on Excel over at Udemy, including its beginners/intermediate Excel 2010 training.

Infinite Skills is a Canadian eLearning company that has extensive experience in producing high definition video training courses for a number of software packages and focuses on practical application of the products in teaches. All three courses can be purchased via Udemy for $99/each and have access to the course forever (or until Udemy folds). Infinite Skills also has a Mac for Excel 2011 course and recently released an Excel 2013 course.

Test Your Excel Skills

If you have not been following our Excel resource series, Chandoo, is an excel guru, Microsoft certified Most Valuable Profession, and purveyor of Chandoo.org, a mega resource on all things Excel. Chandoo also runs his own Excel school. The flagship course focuses on the basics and dashboards, This beginner course has 24 hours of content with an optional 8 hours of Excel dashboard tutorials and makes the modest claim that it can make a beginner in to an “efficient Excel user.”

Among other things, Chandoo’s Excel School promises to teach you how to make awesome Excel dashboards.

The course also comes with 40 example workbooks as well as cheatsheets for shortcuts, formulas, and chart design. The basic online course is $97 for a six-month subscription. A downloadable version of the course and the additional dashboard tutorials cost $147 and $247, respectively. Chandoo also offers specialty courses for financial modeling, project management, and visual basic with similar pricing structure with the exception of the financial modeling course which ranges in price from $297 to $547. These courses are all taught on the PC version of Excel 2007 but according to the Chandoo FAQ most of the knowledge taught applies to 2003 and 2010 versions of Excel.

Excel Everest is a cool option where the entire course takes place in an Excel spreadsheet. What makes it special is that it is an interactive course, a text book, a problem set, computer program, and video guide all in one. It covers over 40 different Excel topics, contains 8 hours video training, and has over 150 interactive quizzes.

There is also a detailed scorecard that tracks your progress with a dashboard display and as you complete certain milestones, you can unlock badges that recognize your achievements making for a fun and enjoyable experience. Excel Everest even has testimonials from Google and Chandoo! ExcelEverest was created by Sean Duffy1, a data and gadget geek, former Google employee, medical and MBA student, and entrepreneur. This course in a spreadsheet can be purchased for $39.99 and is available in PC versions of Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, and Mac for Excel 2011.

ExcelNow! is another interesting option that is embedded in Excel as an add-in which installs a special tab into the Excel ribbon for its learning content that can be revisited at any time. It features tips in over 120 different topic areas, and embeds how-to text, video, and actual examples right into your active workbook, allowing you to practice immediately after learning something new. It also has over 8 hours of supporting video content.

ExcelNow! embeds training tutorials into the Ribbon.

ExcelNow! was developed by Dr. Chris Albright, professor emeritus at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and author of several books on spreadsheet modeling, data analysis, and Visual Basic, and has even been hired by Microsoft to train internal staff on Excel. Several colleges including the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin, and Colorado have adopted the tutorial add-in as a required training course. It can be downloaded for personal use for $49 and also includes access to a free iOS/Android Excel tutorial application.

Excel Hero Academy is another option that comes from Microsoft MVP, Daniel Ferry, and focuses on advanced Excel users. Excel Hero is named after Daniel’s blog, and ventures deep into Excel programming territory and covers advanced formulas and arrays, VB coding, dealing with large complex interlinked workbooks, making dashboards, forms, and macros, and integrating Excel with other platforms, and other advanced subjects 95% of Excel users don’t know about. The course is structured as a 16-week program – each course module is one week long with a review module every three week and includes engaging homework assignments.

The course is lead by Ferry himself, who is a seasoned Excel developer with 26 years of Excel and Visual Basic programming experience. Course access also includes dozens of hours of additional video content as well as access to active member forums. While course runs 16 weeks, students still have access to the course material for an additional 8 weeks. The base course option costs $499 with additional bundling options that also include access to Chandoo’s dashboard course. There is also a premium option that includes an additional 20 weeks of curriculum and access to the course in a downloadable format that students can keep forever. The price is steep but valuable enough that students are enrolling it for a second time.

For someone who just needs to know the basics in Microsoft Excel 2010 and 2013 consider Vodeclic. The Excel 2010 course has 101 tutorials running almost 8 hours and the 2013 course has 156 tutorials and runs over 14 hours. The two courses cover all the basics and even get into some advanced subjects like Pivot Tables. The Excel 2013 course also covers new features like the Flash Fill.

The modules also include a preliminary assessment as well as assignments to apply learned concepts. One cool feature about Vodeclic is that the website is optimized for mobile and tablets, so you can watch the tutorials on your tablet or smartphone. Pricing starts at $9.90/month (for personal use) and a free 30-day trial is available. This price includes access to the Excel courses as well as a growing library of 50 different courses on web apps and desktop software totaling 25,000 hours of desktop software training.

Pick The Course That’s Right For You

If you are ready to learn Excel online you now have some good options to choose from. Each one of these courses has their own strong points. While we personally prefer Filtered because of its thoroughness, versatility, and great value – each one of these courses are fine options. When considering which course is best for you, consider the following factors: What is your learning goal? What is your preferred learning format? How long do you plan on studying for? How much do you want to pay? Once you have determined those factors, the choice will become easy! So what are you waiting for? Pick a course and start getting Skilledup in Microsoft Excel!

**Looking for more resources on Excel? Take a gander at our Excel master resource page to find over 100 guides, tutorials, add-ins, templates and Excel experts.

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Brad is SkilledUp's Chief Content Officer. He has a diverse background that ranges from technology project management and market entry consulting in China to Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing. Brad loves to learn and write and has a BA in Marketing from Cornell University as well as an MBA specializing in the China market from University of Hawaii and Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. He lived and worked in China for three years and speaks Mandarin Chinese.